


Spooky Action at a Distance

by HidetheSilverware (alexa_dean)



Series: (New) VC missing chapters [3]
Category: Vampire Chronicles - Anne Rice
Genre: Anal Fingering, Anal Sex, Angst and Humor, Canon Compliant to a Point, Cockblocking, Don't Try This At Home, Dysfunctional Relationships, Dysfunctional soulmates, Established Relationship, Extremely Dubious Consent, M/M, Manhandling, Masturbation, No Means No, Nonconsensual Rimming, Weird Plot Shit, autoeroticism, bloodsharing, canon-level jealousy and possessiveness, if you're in a relationship like this seek help, loustat is my otp, maladaptive behaviors, mild spanking, miscommunications, mpreg jokes, post-blood communion, these guys need therapy and boundaries, they can't help being soulmates, yeah he's fucking crazy but he's still Louis' baby
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-03
Updated: 2019-03-03
Packaged: 2019-11-08 15:37:27
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,135
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17983871
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alexa_dean/pseuds/HidetheSilverware
Summary: A thwarted bout of phone sex followed by an interrupted bout of exhibitionist sex leads to a successful bout of actual sex.





	Spooky Action at a Distance

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Cesare](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cesare/gifts), [Rebness](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rebness/gifts), [Burnadette_dpdl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Burnadette_dpdl/gifts).



> Idea for the title came from the movie Only Lovers Left Alive. Special thanks goes out to Cesare, Rebness, and Burnadette dpdl for all the endless handholding.

“If you won’t take my video call you could, at the very least, talk me through it,” I say into the phone, back and skull against the tufted headboard, knees bent, naked feet on the mattress, luxuriating in silk sheets and nudity. Which, should be the only way to experience one-thousand thread count surfaces. Or the sort of way I would choose to picture my crotchety cariño at any given time.

Honestly, after everything Louis and I have put each other through, this should be the easiest request to fill. But Louis is a real conundrum, a liminal creature of opposing passions. His needs obscure to me, apart from his cheerful willingness to execute any expressed sadistic perversion – emphasis on ‘expressed’, lest I forget about the time I startled him with some minor kink that ended with an embroidered, one-of-a-kind coat in flames. All the same, Louis will balk at phone sex! My maudlin prince consort is diabolical in his libidinous misrepresentations.

Even after subjecting me to a small eternity of sexual exile, Louis will continue -- unjustly-- to deny me the romance and sentimentality I deserve. Or, perhaps closer to the truth, he knows me better than I know myself and has seen past my disputations and locked on to the fact that I would totally, with typical Lestatian haste, record the entire endeavor for vampire posterity.

“Lestat—”

“Tell me what you’re wearing?” I interrupt, dropping my voice a few decibels, letting the subterranean rumble filter through the phone, as beguiling as I can authentically make without eliciting Louis’ indomitable flight response. I am nothing if not fatally optimistic.

“Long-Johns,” he replies, shuffling paper, likely book pages. “The hoodie I keep specifically for times when you’re not around.”

“One day soon I will find it and burn it.”

“Not likely.”

“Is that a challenge?” The sheets hiss as I resettle onto my back to stare at the medallion on the ceiling, the chandelier crystal bending light into fractals of tiny rainbows on the silvery, paisley wallpaper enveloping the suite. The print too subdued to be anything other than a play on texture. The room is nice, presidential. “It’s a circus tent. You and Cyril both can fit inside together and still have room to spare! Is he there with you? I bet he is. I will sooner have him flex and burst through the seams than see you wear that thing again.”

I take exceeding pleasure parading Louis around at court. His supermodel appeal boosts my sophistication cred by rudimentary association. Louis has brains, beauty, and a low tolerance for bullshit and gossip. He is ruthless: judging, selecting, and discarding people with severe impunity. What softness, what tenderness remains in him is circumstantial. I sense two impulses at war in him: one resigned and self-sacrificing and the other seeking escape. I would bedevil one and leash the latter. Privately, of course. Why? Unreasonable reasons. You wouldn’t understand.

If I had my way, Louis would live in his Sunday best _,_ unless he’s alone with me. Then I prefer him stark-naked, ass up. Louis, out and about, half-drowned in a hoodie, will lower the bar I set. However Louis couldn’t care less what I want. I cover my eyes with my hand, like it might do anything to prevent the encroaching visual of Louis’ chosen loungewear from overtaking my brain.

“I hope you’re not wearing those hideous, outdated boots -- what were they, Uggs?”

“It’s cold, Lestat.”

“You’re wearing them?” I’m working myself up into a paroxysm of expletives. I can feel pressure building behind my eyes as I struggle withholding judgment. “I could have sworn I threw them away!”

“You did,” he says, put-upon. “And I would like to remind you they were a gift to me from Sybelle and not yet a year old. You’re being needlessly wasteful. Think of the example you’re setting for our guests.”

“What do you think I’m doing? Think of the degenerate example _you’re_ setting! Anyway, I should expect nothing less of Sybelle, taking up after Armand, inheriting his _tackiness_ and all that. Now, he’s rubbed off on you too. I should evict them both for truculent bad taste. I will not have you walking around looking like . . . like _\--_ .”

“Like what , Lestat?”

“Like a college student swamped by student loan debt, like you can’t afford healthcare, like a hobo, like an American .”

“I aman American.”

“You don’t really believe that, liar! You’re only saying that to be contrary. You’re about as American as my little toe. The useless one.”

“Imagine it, the Marquis roughin’ it with a Louisiana farm boy. What will the gentry say to that?” Louis banters back in a sugar-swamp drawl full of misanthropic teeth. The dreamy anarchist amused at my outrage.

“Did you get the package I sent?” I ask, skin bristling hot. I scarcely recognize the rasp in my voice, the near catch. I know the answer. I know he signed for the box.

“Hmmm?”

I repeat myself, knowing full well he heard me the first time.

“You won’t wear them,” I say; words floating disembodied. In a way I admire Louis’ dogged defiance, his courage, his lack of compunction, but not tonight. “I went through the trouble of having them made bespoke for you in London and you won’t wear them.” The gift in question is a pair of tinted reading glasses: satin-finished frames spare enough to leave Louis’ uniquely fetching bone structure unobstructed. “Your rebellion against eyewear will have global repercussions.”

“I don’t follow.”

“You do too,” I say, “Nothing escapes you unless you deliberately allow it to.”

“Explain-- or don’t . I change my mind. I would rather you keep it to yourself.”

“Bear with me,” I say, emboldened, regardless. “I want you to know where I’m coming from. Picture it. Young sleazy entrepreneur, a Martin Shkreli type, runs into you. He’s dazzled, smitten, taken in by your eyes. He makes a few phone calls. Finds a shady sweatshop in China and mass manufactures contact lenses in your shade. A young no-name someone orders a few contacts from eBay for a night on the town, wears them to sleep and wakes up blind. Naturally, the blame will be mine since I’m responsible for you. Assumptions will be made about the promotion of unethical capitalism and my role in it. I will suffer massive political consequences. But hey, you keep doing you, Louis. Keep flashing your naked eyes at the mortal masses.”

After a beat, he exhales, curtly. “Why stop at recreating eye color? Why not matching wigs to boot,” Louis is not always a gentleman and least of all with me. He knows how I feel about his hair. “Suppose I will have to shave my head. I have shears on standby, if that is your wish.”

“Don’t be daft, wigs won’t cause blindness.”

“No, but there is probability for allergic reaction.”

“Hives do not present a loss to life, limb, or eyesight.”

“No, but a freak encounter can lead to a methicillin-resistant staph outbreak. A wig factory is as good a place as any to perpetuate an epidemic.”

“If I can’t spell it, then you’ve made it up. You’re making things up.”

“You don’t have to know how to spell any of it,” he explains, his tone thick with a stifled smile, because he’s Louis and the bastard has an answer for everything and continues, “Have Siri look up flesh-eating bacteria.” There is no embrace violent, or brutal, or bestial enough for the likes of him.

My mouth tucks in at the corners and the skin around my eyes tightens all the way around. I can imagine him in a dimly lit room. Indistinct like the afterimage of the sun, because he isn’t something that can be fully understood or reconstructed, much less recollect. There is always something different. Something more to remember. Cowled head, hands hidden away in sleeves, cotton fabric ending abruptly close to his knees and those horrid, fleece-lined boots with flues as big around as his thighs. A tender wisp of a man: lovely and faintly ominous as a Balinese puppet with his sly green eyes and the ever so long reach of his precisely contoured limbs.

I’m of the belief that genetic chance imbued Louis with too much beauty of the ruinous variety. The sort that often triggers even the most diffident pedestrian into uttering the crudest, wildest declarations. Or worse, sometimes subjecting Louis to their openly audacious hands. Yet somehow chance also managed to grossly miscarry the temperament essential to appreciate the privilege beauty demands. Louis is hopelessly clueless of it. It has therefore made of our relationship a cosmic joke. Our life together has all the hallmarks of a black comedy in the style of Moliere. I ask for phone sex and Louis gives me a conversation about flesh-eating bacteria.

“Can we start over?” I don’t _-_ beg in weariness, restlessly punching the pillow beneath my head. “Lie to me. Tell me you wear nothing save the reading glasses on your face and a secret smile all for me. I haven’t had a decent release since I left you for New York. I’ve done nothing but listen to griefs and grievances since I touched ground in this blasted city. It’s a vampire urban nightmare.” My cock lays nudged against my thigh, semi-hard. I brush my fingers against it. “I’ve been on my best behavior. Promise. Ask Thorne.”

“We need only wait for tomorrow,” he says, polite and mild as ever, by way of what? Excuse? Apology? I don’t understand. Never in all my years have I met anyone more suited to taking dick than Louis, trim and overripe in all the right places. Those fuck-me-sized lips and dat ass, because there is no serious way to say it without risk of sounding pretentious. Yet . . . yet my wan-colored wifey is painfully, inexplicably reserved outside of our cloak-and-dagger sexplay.

“But I need you now ,” I think of the blue-green veins surfacing for air at his slender wrists, the backs of his palms, his neck, the crooks of his elbows and inner thighs; the heat straight through the middle of him where he would be dripping wet from the time before with which I yearn to reacquaint myself, at this very lurid, tantalizing juncture of our taciturn conversation. “Now tell me again what you’re no longer wearing, beautiful one?” I say and fist my lengthening dick, annoyed to be so wretched over him.

But hopeful. Forever that.

“I’ll see you tomorrow, Lestat.”

He might as well have punched me in the face for all the effect his stonewalling has on me. I shout into the phone: “You’re an asshole, Louis! A prude and an asshole!”

He’d hung up. It must make life easier not to want things all the time as I do. And I imagine myself thrusting his shirt up to the nape of his neck and kicking his legs apart, chasing after those deep agonal sounds, sheathed to the hilt with his harsh, unsubtle body. In the dark. In my dreams.

I don’t fling my phone against the wall this time, for which I applaud myself for because it shows that one of us is growing as a person in this relationship.

Yes, I’m twisted up with jealousy and yearning and something worse: the fear of being found out as an imposter, found lacking by some mysterious means known only to Louis and therefore judged as undeserving of his love. It stems from this unshakeable feeling I get sometimes that Louis may not want me to desire him. That he would prefer not to enjoy himself. That sex is something to be done quickly for my benefit, as a sacrifice , instead of the tribute it obviously should be.  My insecurity charges my indiscretions with the wild abandon of an overachieving attention whore. The more liable our love, the more indiscreet and plentiful my affairs. This is the first time in --  I don’t even know how long -- that I’ve made it a point not to dally outside of my primary relationship. I could have never imagined it. Lestat inflicted to self-imposed monogamy.

Right now, I wasn’t feeling particularly assured of my position in Louis’ life. I stare up at the TV, consider watching porn, then dismiss the idea. I want Louis to experience the full wrath of a week’s worth of deferred desire.

***

By the time we arrive it’s well past midnight. I leave it to Thorne to make the necessary announcements and brook no argument against my explicit wish to be left alone for the remainder of the night. And all of the next. Emergencies only. No exceptions. For anyone. Cyril is the first to know of my whereabouts by nature of his new post as Louis’ bodyguard. And since Louis has a habit of misplacing his cellphone, Cyril serves as telepathic liaison to me by default when I’m away and checking in on my obstinate fledgling.

But let me be honest. Let’s be real : Louis’ abduction by the late Rhoshamandes has left me significantly paranoid. My mother rarely leaves Sevraine’s side (or, more to the truth, Sevraine refuses to leave hers) which serves my purposes well enough and Marius, the old Roman has assured me he’s implemented strategies to protect himself. I choose to believe him. He’s too fastidious not to pre-plan for copycat offenses.

And what has Louis done for my peace of mind? Nothing. Not one thing. What reservations kept him from hunting alone the first month after the incident, evaporated by the second. Unexpectedly, Armand was the first one to rat Louis out. He tried his hand at dissuading Louis from taking his midnight constitutionals into the neighboring wood alone. Louis wanted time to think, had said our halls were (are) too noisy for him, too crowded with social climbers, intrigue, untethered thoughts and equally unwelcome sentiments.

Armand tried his best to keep pace at a reasonable distance but couldn’t sustain it without giving himself away and once exposed Louis would take to the air and leave Armand stranded himself. Furious and worried, Armand called to blame me for giving Louis just enough powerful blood for him to grow over-confident, but not enough to supersede my strength and that of those like me should any of us try to overcome my errant third-born.

Being the awesomely attentive Master that I am, I bequeathed my beloved a beast of a bad ass keeper. Even I don’t know if I could defeat Cyril in hand-to-hand combat. And I’m as confident in my skills as I have ever been, or more so because history has repeatedly crowned me victor in the direst of circumstances.

Quick stop in my apartments to relieve myself of soiled, tattered garments and envelop my body in a wicked-thin silk robe for creature comfort, for ease of access, but mostly in lecherous anticipation. Louis isn’t waiting to greet me of course, and I refuse to delay, so I leave the sumptuous enclosure of my bedroom for Louis’ unfinished chambers. In Hermès slippers no less, hardly more than letter-shaped thongs committed to tenuous soles. Because it really isn’t as cold as Louis makes Auvergne weather out to be. Silk-and-sandals should be the only way to receive his Prince, unless he’s naked and spread-eagled. Then he should always be that.

As much as I would love to think courage had been the deciding factor for Magnus when he’d forced his legacy upon my unwary, impressionable self, it wasn’t. _I_ just so happened to be the good-looking guy that survived with mind, body and memory intact. I’d already commanded the full breadth of my wolf-whistle figure for a good four years before Magnus preserved me for eternity.

My body, in life, had been no less than Instagram-worthy without filters. When sculptors take up hammer and chisel, it is _my_ shape they seek in stone. No fabric can diminish its contours. Unlike Louis who can pass for a coat hanger with a hair’s breadth of superfluous cloth. I’d been an apex predator even as a clueless mortal and my body is a testament to that efficiency of movement and strength. I’ve brought the eldest of our kind to their privileged knees with lust or outright defeat with my indifference. But you would never know my power to look upon Louis’ treatment of me.

What good is it to have immortals fling themselves at my feet in hopes that I would so much as step on them in my ascent to Olympus and consider themselves blessed when Louis maintains all of his faculties at the sight of me, about as amused as a feral and frequently sleepy cat? Mind you, a demon cat that takes pleasure from knocking off all of my valuable shit to the floor from the lofty pedestal I placed him on.

It is true that the more reserved and severe Louis is with me, the more I want to assert the fire in him, as though his resistance heightens the value of achieving the ever elusive simultaneous orgasm. Sense memory and half-formed images of Louis haunt me: Louis holding my wrists down into a mattress, dragging his piqued nipples over my chest, slight body furling and unfurling restlessly like an untethered sail around a mast, rocking, helpless to the swell and undertow of my passion, anchored only by the strength of his thighs on my hips. My mouth on his tongue. His tongue in my mouth. Gasping and bloody with undisciplined love, unable to express it without begetting pain, even after two centuries, or because of them.

Louis’ apartment is finished by his standards, with exposed oak beams and girders laced green with rust. He had Alain stop work plastering over the mottled granite walls because it would cover the moss and lichen growing there. The remaining masonry will stay untouched, the blinding white plaster ending as abruptly as though it had crumbled off. He’s recreated New Orleans aesthetic in my native home, chock full of disrepair and wild indoor plants. A sorcerer’s lair to be sure, as spooky as he is. The juxtaposition of ornate furniture against seemingly unfinished architecture isn’t quite the catastrophe I expected but I won’t admit to it.

The bed is a frightful mess of pillows and afghans, book spines facing out from underneath the mattress and tomes stacked in towers taller than I am in every dusty corner. I suppose controlled chaos can pass for cozy in this modern age. Looking around I recognize the end tables and armoire from last season’s furnishings, removed from my own room only months before, now reemployed here. The UV-canceling curtains are kept closed mostly so the atmosphere remains as voluptuous as it is slumberous, with all the layered textiles strewn about.

Beeswax candles and cedar logs cast heat and light from the marble hearth, interrupted by the massive silhouette of a Queen Anne armchair. It’s only natural for me to move toward it, expecting to find Louis tightly curled into a tidy, be-hoodied, Ugg-footed ball of indignation: a frostbitten flower on skinny, broken stems, reading the same book for the ten-thousandth time and still having the audacity to prefer it over phone-sexing his Prince .

I miss a step. Had I been human and bound to the laws of gravity, I would have face-planted into the aged bourbon-colored floorboards, because space, time, thought, everything had fallen away to nothing. Deep in oxblood leather, Louis sits enthroned in a Queen Anne chair. Gleaming, randomly naked, arms and legs akimbo. His lambent eyes unyielding and skipping over me like a stone over water, comet-bright against deceptively fragile skin as remarkably yielding and poreless as that of a human child’s; the color nearer to the surface.

Something should be said about the unpredictable nature of my bloodline. Never is it more obvious than with Louis, strangest of all my children. Whereas the visual texture of my skin recalls a certain luminous stoniness, Louis’ is vaporous, not so much reflecting light, as holding it, a dynamic overlay through which the eerie labyrinth of blood can be followed to its source. It is never more undeniable than when he’s bare and in open rebellion to my will. However placid and cool Louis may school his expression, his skin’s flush will betray him.

Let me say this, Louis’ nudity means nothing. Assures no obeisance to my wants, save my own. I am rendered dumb and deprived of all inclination toward amorous courtship. Instead I grow dizzy with the painful rechanneling of blood to my already flooded cock. The timing is as suspicious as my reaction to his nakedness is wantonly Pavlovian.

Perhaps I never had to truly try for anything because I’d been born beautiful. The sort of universal comeliness that comes from fortunate placement and a statuesque play of shadows. People like me, despite themselves. However, Louis is immune to my wiles, as likely pissed off as he might be turned on, but I never know with him because his intentions can be convoluted at the best of times and my actions irrepressible at the worst. This is the last thing I expect of him. He’s hardened me with his denial. This, now , here, like this is too easy. Louis is suddenly and without precedent too easy and all that bare skin distracting in a curiously familiar way. I have never had to work so hard to stay in someone’s good graces as I have with Louis. And I wasn’t much in his good grace when we last spoke.

Curiouser and fucking curiouser.

“Louis,” I breathe into the air, my tongue licking across my teeth, vowels hollowing the roof of my mouth, deep in my throat, where I would have him, tonight, even if this ends as fucked as I have a bad habit of making, because I’m notorious for self-sabotage. A quick mental scan tells me in moments that we are in fact alone in the room. There is no lover hiding under the bed or hanging from the balcony by the skin of his teeth, so to speak.

However, Louis has that wild look when he returns late at night sometimes, after a trek through old-growth wood, before a shower -- hair dark and damp as Egyptian soil and his skin flushed pink like dawn. If I kiss him he will taste of dew, wet flowers, earth and early morning grass. The tip of his nose will be cool and the inside of his mouth sunwarm from animal blood, an early morning snack before sleep. And I could swear I’m making love to a slippery-skinned elemental creature with indelible, unbreakable spirit. Something in perpetual flight, something in hiding. A naiad, or a wood nymph. A Daphne of my very own: fleet-footed with an otherworldly tendency toward stillness as only wild things are.

The more legendary the beauty, the greater pleasure in desecrating it. How to explain the fever and savagery of our encounters? It is like nothing other. Not simply the vain celebration of my triumph over his natural reserve, but the feeling that I’d slayed monsters and overcome dragons in the shape of a shared history and at the cost of great personal suffering. Yes, Louis may rebel, withdraw secretly inside himself in fear of me that is not all unfounded. I’ve gored him, sometimes intentionally and other times without thinking, for a million-and-one real and imagined slights.

But I’m learning , quietly besieging the impregnable citadel he’s erected against me. It is only after I have brutally exhausted him that he can give freely of himself without care and I can claim the opportunity to melt him with all the tenderness he so often rejects. Every quarrel, every wound, every betrayal is worth a second of Louis’ final submission to my love. A mutual love which can and will frequently thumb its nose at us without reason and vacation inside a subterranean void for an unspecified amount of time. Or long enough for us to get over ourselves and return to it, impatient and inescapable as gravity, and God save anyone caught in the crossfire of our reunion.

I’m unaware that I’ve moved until I feel the spread of slender toes like the five-pointed rays of a dawning sun smack center of my solar plexus and the unsaid -- this far, no further. A trinity of muscle groups -- vastus medialis and lateralis, rectus femoris -- clearly cast underneath the turquoise branches of the saphenous vein of his thigh.

My hand encircles the right ankle, thumb stroking the high instep, the other cupping the tense calf. I consider kissing the exquisitely overdeveloped shin, demonstrative of a life spent sprinting in and out of the perfumed beds of other men’s wives, heels never gracing to touch the earth in flight. Light-footed Louis of the glorious legs, forever hidden away under his drab garb.

It isn’t hyperbole on my part. It is _,_ however, the first time that I do feel resentment toward them -- for once much too-long for me as I’m halted a full Louis’-leg-length away from my sordid goal. Measure out a nonliteral mile or two, a fun two-days-hump on foot to town when I’ve had such a protracted trip already and you’d find the full measure of my frustration at the distance. Some of the impatience must show on my face.

“Wait _,_ ” Louis says gently, his face like a quiet pool, revealing nothing save what I project onto it like the jackass narcissist I often become around him, unwilling to consider desires incongruent to my own. “Hear me out. I think we’re both falling into old patterns and we already know how well those worked out for us in the past.”

“It’s too late,” I say, taking one-half step closer, leering into that much loved, much studied, structurally perfect face of such disturbing beauty, it wasn’t quite human even when he had been a mortal man of five and twenty. Louis had singlehandedly brought me to heel the moment he’d raked all that unruly hair away from shadowy eyes full of demons, his complexion having already assumed in his mortality the morbid hothouse paleness of a whore given exclusively over to the dark, sex and vice.

And like a whore, Louis had flung his scrawny, unfeeling body at anyone and anything who would have him, not for love or devotion or money, like any normal human being, but for annihilation from undeserved guilt. I know that now. Feel it in my bones as surely as he’d sucked new life from my wrist and the way he fills me now with below-the-belt yearning.

People had ogled even then. Even without the dark gift to enhance the texture and glow of his skin and eyes, to infuse the grace in his movements and the resonance in his voice, as though some great idol -- terrible Kali Ma, blood-drenched Achilles, disheveled Christ with cross -- had strolled into a pub, ordered a drink and dropped a ribald joke about a priest. It was just that unlikely. That incredible. Louis breathed a different air than the rest of us. He exists on a parallel plane dreaming the world into existence like an impermeable Brahman.

“I’ve waited, enough,” I say, my mouth stretching wide to touch the poison in my eyes with a smile I wasn’t sure I felt. Captured by the reflection framed in the glass of the night-filled window behind Louis, I look every bit as irresistible as I would have been to anyone with two functioning eyes. “Give me a good reason to obey and I might,” I add, surprising myself with uncharacteristic diplomacy.

“Look, I have none of your fearlessness,” he starts in, “I’m a coward. You know this and you keep coming to me thinking I’ve changed. Be patient. My brand of awkwardness is persistent and not easily overcome.” Firelight plays over Louis’ features, his sweeping eyelashes, the gleam melting from the apex of his cheekbones to the deeper teal shadows below. “Not even for you.”

“I see what you’re doing,” I say, never fully understanding the depth of my own anger until my mouth solidifies it for me. My words are bricks flung haphazardly. “You think I don’t know? You would rather have me possess you and discard you quickly. But that has never been my way.”

Louis withdraws his raised leg to perch the heel on the cushion, knee drawn up tight to his chin. Glancing down at him from my height, his heedful eyes take on a slanting, kittenish shape. Here, should be the inevitable head dip from him, the curtain call, the avoided gaze under the onslaught of unkempt curls, the acquiescence. It doesn’t happen. He observes me with the casually stern composure of a saint. Mouth compressed into a sensual, if not forbidding ‘m’ to ward off my insolence.

When he makes no attempt to respond, I continue: “You’re far too skilled to be as coy as you keep playing at. You’ve been with men as well as women. Just as I have.” Apparently, sex is the last thing on my mind the way I keep chipping away at my chances for a steamy romp in the sack.

“What does it matter ?” he hurls the question back at me with all the vehemence he’d held in, keen as an unsheathed blade. “Believe me when I say you’re my first , Lestat. I had never loved anyone before you. Never. And what I did two-hundred years ago as a stupid, self-obsessed mortal had nothing to do with desire! It was rage . It was a knife I used upon myself.”

His eyes glow an extraordinary green, restless light on pavonine plumage, or the unnerving iridescence of a skittering carapace. Something both alive, yet potentially poisonous.

“ _Let it go_ , Lestat. You would interrogate me over ghosts to prove what? By modern definition, I’ve only ever had one lover and that’s you.”  

How like a king he looked to me -- shoulders squared straight and fine against the chair back -- subordinating my pleasure to his whim. “It is you I think of upon waking and you upon dozing and you would have me obsess over you in your absence? Obsession is not love. Obsession is madness.” My words may inflict blunt force trauma, but Louis’ words are puncture wounds and arterial spray.

Blade drawn, he continues: “Have you forgotten already? What we were like back then? How utterly mad for each other: sixty-five years, Lestat! I remember. It haunts me. But unlike you I value the reasonand sensibility necessary to fully grasp what I have lived through with you. I would have the respite and sanctuary now that you would not afford me then.”

“Don’t lie. You would kill that love,” I interject, embittered. “I can feel your treachery. It’s a disgrace to bide your time doing nothing to sustain it and treat it philosophically and sensibly. It is you who has forgotten how to love. There was once a time when men fought- killed -died for a glove or a glance! We lived through all of it together. And it was glorious. I would do it all over again, changing nothing.”

His expression closes over, impenetrable and remote, freezing me out as usual.

Nastily, I say: “Separation makes me murderous and suicidal. You should know that.”

How easy it would be to tell him that I don’t truly mean these things, that he should ignore me. That it all stems from being irrationally jealous of everything that touches him that isn’t an extension of my body, that the only way I can react to his eloquence and grace is with disorder and violence. And because it would be the sane and healthy thing to admit, to gloss things over, I don’t say it aloud like I should.

With fire beneath his skin and the touch of his inimical regard affecting me like an intimate caress he says: “How dare you dismiss my feelings! They are every bit as meaningful and intense as yours. More so _,_ because my love has grown past its destructive, infantile state. It has evolved with time into something nobler, though no less infinite. I live for you. Because of you. Every breath is yours. You’ve conquered me. I have submitted. You have won! There is no one else who monopolizes my heart as you do. What is left? I don’t understand what it is I’m not already giving you? You have me, Lestat. You have for a long time now.”

As if to stress the point, he stretches his parted legs in an obscene pose, out and away from the body, leaving his sex unprotected by hooking his legs over the upholstered arms of the overstuffed chair with the easy flexibility and wiry agony of Sergei Polunin. A boldly cunning invitation to let things go, disguised as a white flag. All I have to do is trip and fall and we’d be fucking. But I could not let go of the argument.

“I will have every memory and every name of every person who has ever meant anything to you and I would replace them with me.”

He laughs. A short, dry burst through his nose. “You think it’s possible for me to think of anyone but you?” he says into the semi-darkness that isn’t darkness at all to my eyesight, but it is relative to the manner in which Louis glows, dimming the world in comparison with his casual divinity.

“Oh, it’s not enough when we’re together,” I needle, folding my arms over my chest, thrusting my chin at him. “I would have your peace of mind, too. Show me. Show me the effect I have over you when I’m not present. Isn’t that what you’re about to do? Show me how you touch yourself when you think of me?”

“What are we even fighting about?” Louis huffs, faun ears and molded cheeks rosy, full of dark heat, but he doesn’t change his compromised position for a favorably guarded one. Won’t look away from me either. After all, one wouldn’t look away from a rattling snake.

“You say you want me, but you’re endlessly annoyed with my subdued demeanor and always have been! You mistake my quips for disdain, you would have us bitterly brutalize each other again for no reason. You’re not content with me, admit it. I lose color in the context of your fanciful life. I do not fit in! You have deceived yourself into thinking you have need of me.”

He watches me intently, quiet and ferocious as an animal long acquainted with human violence. If I offer refuge in my arms now, he would break my hands. I’ve gone too far.

I wish I had the power to fast-forward into the future, past my eternal cock-blocking. Haunted by the unbridgeable distance between our old selves and the ghost of Louis’ natural inclination toward muteness, I blurt out: “You’re cheating on me. It’s why you won’t have phone sex,” because any reaction is better than no reaction from Louis. Anger I can handle. Apathy, not so much. “I’m willing to bet, you don’t even remember how to bring yourself to orgasm alone because you’re too used to me doing it for you . And if not me, someone else.”

He does look away then, slow and deliberate, inciting the tail end of a summer memory when the come-hither stare I’d hoped for surrendered to the hostile reality of that damaged, challenging creature I’d nursed back to life. The phantom peppery scent of smoke had clung to him when I’d held him to me, his shoulders flexing like broken wings against my chest, my wrist in his mouth, his skeleton little more than a cage for his soul. And there I was smitten as ever, deluding myself then into believing that things would be different, that I had rescued him enough times from oblivion for him to finally show gratitude by warming up to me.

“You’re incredible ,” his pitches his voice low and breathy. He palms the back of his neck, rakes fingers to the crown, pauses and gently tugs at what the wind had made of his dark hair. Slick reins. Whipping cord. His hard-seeming eyes distant, pupils lost in luminous green, dulling all else to mud and mountain shadow.

“Do it, then. Prove me wrong,” I taunt, roiling with arousal and rage. Taking to both unpious knees, to sit on my calves, palms in my lap like a sphinx, eyes fixed with obsessional concentration upon Louis’ face, the heave of his chest, his sex. He would kick me. I know it. I would kick me.

“Alright,” he says, ceasing to breathe. Those provocative eyes, that alluring mouth in that superbly sensual face-- aggression, love, hate, it all elicits the same inflammatory response. “Open your robe. I would look at you.” He’s as likely to kill me as submit to me. How I had treasured that look from him before I’d fallen victim to it.

Ever the consummate actor, I displace the vulnerability I felt with the theatricality of meaningless habit: touch my tongue to my lip, spread my knees, reclining ever-so-slightly, all of me made infinitely more conspicuous when the robe separates like a curtain to fall away on the ground and I’m revealed to be a glowing, golden effigy of a once lovelorn and subjugated Lelio begging for scraps of Louis’ favor in the currency of threat and fury. I glance at him through my lowered eyelashes, calculate a turning away that says: ‘Do you like what you see? Touch me. Want me.’

All the while, refusing to hide the simple, absurd fact that in spite of all our bickering I still want to fuck him. That the only constant-- aside from my love --is my desire for him. Hate falters under Louis’ cursory glance, the boyish smile that would dismiss my hostility over the fact he would relegate me to an insulting peripheral existence given an opportunity. It would never do. I would have center-stage always; especially in his life.

And I had it now, for the moment, in this place at his feet. I feel Louis drink of me with his eyes, surveying my face over and over, my smooth cheeks, the curl sprung over my brow, the irrefutable hunger in my expression; lingering on my mouth, troublesome and salacious. The intensity of his gaze drugs me into a docile, reflective state of absolute eroticism.

I live in a tableaux, flickering from one self-important moment to another as little by little, Louis swells in his own hand. His outflung legs and long, scuppered throat posed like an offering, offsetting the immodesty of the moment. It’s very obscene, very surreal: that androgynous face, the delicate frame, the midsummer voice, and that dick . I want to laugh, and cradle his body against mine. I want to kiss him deeply, and all over, for possessing such a magnificent thing.

I’m not a size-queen except for when I am a size-queen with Louis. I love the aesthetic of him, of it, his long, lean body, the sound and heft of his sex flopping around when I fuck him, dirty and deep as my love. How it becomes an afterthought when I take him, a metaphor for my potent helplessness in the scope of our centuries-long affair. And it’s pink-tipped and true as few things in my life are: Priapus glimpsed through rose-colored lenses, because there is always a color to everything when we’re together, shadows pale and shrink away. Stars are born from the energy we radiate in our copulation.

The movement starts half way, with a twist at the tip, and then off, only to be groped near the base with the other hand, which travels the impressive length too, but not before the former returns to steady the blood-flushed shaft. And I’ve seen that same expression on his face before, red-cheeked and amped before a hunt, severe with seething hunger that doesn’t come from any precise region typical of a vampire. Stupid of me to believe I can hold back for any extended length of time to see him through it.

Picture the most exquisite, long-fingered hands worthy of any heralding angel or suffering saint and wrap them around the second most perfect dick, primed and already wet-tipped, veins thickening into ropes of violet, almost too shapely and pretty for porn if the size wasn’t so genre appropriate. I hover over it, that sacred image, uneasily disarmed by the peachy loveliness of the exposed sac at its base. Hairless from an early, well-fated misadventure with a lousy whore and now forever available to my aggressively willing mouth. I feel subverted with an urge to suckle them, hold the plum fullness over my tongue and possess them completely, but not yet.

Louis is too perfect. He has all the incisive lines of a lean young man, if a little bony at the joints. Looking at him, you have to believe in a higher power, an omnipresence. He is nothing if not divinely manifested from my wettest dreams. A waist so slim the taut skin refuses to crease regardless of the jack-knifed posture. Even Armand has a certain girlish roundness to his belly, his androgyne extending to include his body. It isn’t the same with Louis. His muscles are drum tight. It seems to pain him to display himself for me, the stroke of his brows coming together at the dimple above the nose-bridge, lip-chewing and wild-haired like he’d been running or fucking.

It’s pleasant torture to give myself up for worship. He flatters me with an unraveling, unmade expression, his body becoming a mindless, sensual, separate creature, losing control; hand a tight pump up and down. It softens his objection when I inchworm closer to contemplate him better with a half-hearted, half-thought: ‘don’t .’ The citrusy tang of blood and desire thick in the air, moisture leaks from the flushed head of his dick, mapping a slick, steady thread for his palm to follow, his skin darkening cherry pink around the secret mouth of his body.

“What about there?” I ask, lifting a sneaky, impudent hand to the plummy, shady place behind the circumspect rise of balls. “Do you touch yourself here?” Looking directly into his eyes, I splay two fingers in a vee and slide them on either side of the tight, little aperture. His spine snaps taut, unyielding, unwilling, yet unable to escape the drumbeat of my touch at that hidden crease, approximating for tension. I caress him, feel the muscular tremors betray his responsiveness. His liquid eyes feverish and dazed. His remoteness vanishing with his irises, swallowed whole and entire in the void of his pupils.

“Non.”

“Never?” I’m honestly curious and surprised.

Loose shake of his head, eyes sliding to the right, his saintly hands allay in his lap. His hips tremble in the chair, a slow, just perceptible rock, as he wars with the urge to flee from the possibilities of expansive pleasure.

“Why not?” I ask quietly.

“Do _you_?” he challenges. Typical Louis.

“It’s enough to remember how I take you,” I answer, truthfully. “I will have no distractions. I immerse myself in the feeling of it.” A smile overtakes my face like the sun, warm then hot, and I wonder if the blood can be seen through my honey-brown tan. “I would live inside you if I could.”

“Have you ever--?” he stops mid-question, too shy to finish and my heart swells for him and I feel strange, wanting to draw him in to myself to protect, with no sexual urge except the instinct to receive and enfold as a mother would. The feeling is short-lived as I catch the inscrutable glance of a woman loosening her garter in his expression, an unconscious coquetry for sure.

“Yes, of course,” I say, feeling open, sensing the distance between us narrow to a razor’s keen edge. “I wouldn’t be as good at what I do if I hadn’t experienced it all for myself.” I’m so close I could kiss his knee.

His ass right there. And at just the right height, once past his defenses, I insinuate a free hand behind his right kneecap, lifting it higher, spreading him wider, forcing a small, tight sound from his throat when I penetrate him with my fingertips. Rising up before him, leaning in to capture that unsparing mouth in a quickening motion with my own, breaking through the tough-muscled band barring entry into his body. I dip into his mouth, steal sips from his lips. My sticky, hesitant thumb following the beaded, puckered edge of the opening.

Louis has never been like the static clay figures I’ve fashioned from real-life lovers to fit my needs, never been eager to take shape in my hands or surrender to my substantial charm. Louis is elusive, an agile dancer in my arms, wildly resplendent, always poised between movement and stillness, supple and fast on his feet. A mind too slippery to grasp, evading me.

“You’re so tight,” I whisper approvingly, into his mouth, my voice guttural with emotion, fluttery as a bird. Anointed with the shrink-wrap press of his body clinging to my fingers.

He swallows, sleepy-looking, pink-cheeked, blinks then says, “No thanks to you.”

“Are you worried about losing your shape?” I tease, amused and already moving down his fawn-soft neck to the mirrored spurs of his clavicles. I tiptoe on fingertip, seeking out nerves, pushing in with careful, compressed violence. Studying his face, his body, the hitch in his rhythm, and then it comes, a deep breath like he’s surfacing, like he’s remembering how to breathe or that he’s supposed to. Flesh dilating finally, finally . His fingers bite into my biceps, his legs snap shut, anemone-like.

“Louis, I can’t move with your legs closed.”

“Give me a moment,” he hisses, capturing my earlobe between his teeth in an empty threat. My skin responds by flooding inexplicably hot like the memory of swimming in cheap wine and wenchy cunt.

“Who do you think I am?” I growl, clasping his throat with fingers splayed, knocking his head against the leatherback, squeezing a little to feel the strong rapid beat under them. Wanting inside him, I wrest his knees apart, inserting my body between them as I slide my lips down the front of his chest, hesitating to suckle one seashell pink nipple then the other until the atmosphere grows balmy with shivery panting breaths. I draw the curve of his pectoral into my mouth as though it were a morsel to devour.

Louis shudders, boneless and near faint with pleasure, his blood and muscle against my lips, pulse threatening to break on my teeth. How like a restless sleeper undulating against an unfinished torrent of dreams. How different to the twitch-happy ache I feel in my clenched muscles and stomach, the goosepimpling over holding back. His yielding almost makes me hurt him, to rouse him in some way. Savage with greedy need, my nails cut into the meat of his legs, gathering them to shove up and over in a dangle over the armrests, commanding: “Keep them _here_.”

His eyes round comically, then snap into slits of gleaming indignation. Blades of his cheeks flashing moonlight to sunburn in nanoseconds and between my legs my dick bobs, seeps from slippery tip. Hastily, I duck away from the humiliation of feeling clumsy-fifteen and love-crazy at two-hundred and fifty, fixing my hands on Louis’ knobby kneecaps. Thrusting my face into the smug perkiness of his ass, jaw open at once, noir-movie kissing him, the tip of my tongue dipping into the declivity, tasting cedar soap and skin salt.

Unable to escape, Louis gasps, bucking, as I take the full measure of him with my tongue. The chair creaks as though it would snap in two as I invade and fill and jab. I would pry him open with my thumbs if he weren’t so prone to diary-locking his legs together. I kiss him urgently, nudge and shove, seeking entry, offering tribute. I suck kisses, drag my lips across smooth apricot skin of his perineum, pierce it with my teeth. He curses at me, yanking my hair to no avail as I open my mouth to the ferrous taste of blood, letting it gather in the dip of the aperture before lapping it up. My nuts full again, growing heavier and a voluptuous feeling comes over all of my body, the very universe dilating around me.

Out of the two of us, I am by far the noisier. No surprise there. I growl and hum and make plaintive, pretty noises when cursing up a filthy storm isn’t feasible. Spittle and blood spreads onto the surrounding warmth, turning sap-sticky against my cheeks. Finally, finally, Louis levers himself away from the seat, allows me to grip him in two hands to push and pull him onto my face, swirling my tongue around in a circlet, a nautilus right into the submerged muscle I would leave as wet and welcoming as a woman’s womb. It’s the dirtiest, nastiest thing anyone has ever done to him, or no one has ever, and I’m making him take it and love it.

I lick, lick until I’m grown lazy and languid, until Louis stops fighting and starts humping the air in a burlesque of alarm, of promise, and he softens like velvet, like satin against my mouth. My fingers brawler-knuckle deep in candy-pink bliss. Pads rub at the nerve bundle until it stiffens like a little nipple. His body quickening suddenly, pulsing around my tongue, my fingers. Shock going through him like electricity I could feel, tightening every muscle from thigh to shoulder. A plangent, startled half laugh, half shout, mingled joy and hysteria. He’d come. Goosebumps erupt over the skin on my arms, listening to his sobbing laughter sounds.

I move to claim a kiss and he blocks it swiftly with a hand to my mouth. “Disgusting,” he says to me fondly, like he didn’t just reject me, like he didn’t just come with his dick untouched, from only the stimulation of my mouth and fingers. Ingrate.

“Fuck you,” I volley back and whip him around, exposing the fullness of his buttocks to me, the dimples at the bottom of the spine, the incurving back. “I prefer you like this anyway. Your ass is the only thing that’s ever happy to see me. It’s the only amenable, bubbly thing about you. I wouldn’t keep you around otherwise.” I press a hand on his back, pinning his torso into the seat of the armchair and lay into him three times good and proper with the flat of my other hand. He turns back to glare obstinately over his shoulder at me, furious and trembling with it. But I wasn’t quite done. Grinning madly, I grab him by the literal balls to ensure his tacit compliance and give him three more swots, palm cracking and bouncing away in satisfying thwacks.

“Motherfucker!” he pitches a curse at me, knot in his throat obvious. “I hate you.” I could almost believe him. Almost.

“Yes, I know,” I say and cull precious liquid from his still heavy cock to coat my straining dick. Pressing it in, the change is abrupt as an audible pop. Louis’ growl chokes off, becomes something clearer and wild and wandering like it hurt him, like I’d hurt him just being inside. Scratching, scrabbling hands tremble on the tufted leather, like I’m too much, too sudden. But not so much to deny me, to object my invasion.

My hands grab at his ass, pull it apart by the cheeks. Observe the blushing little hole clutching me, that wonderful, inexorable slide into his body, spread wide and pink like an open horizon at sunset. I’m left feeling full to bursting from love, like I’m the one being fucked open. There is warmth. Real heat, unborrowed and metabolic.

It’s fitting that we became new monsters together, fated to be human-adjacent. Fareed’s unplanned mistakes, experiment gone awry. And Louis burns, obliterates me like he glows on the inside like I want to, a sunburst of utter brilliance.

I say his name, loud and lost, stroke the elegant lines of his back, his slender waist. It becomes clear, too clear what I want. I would tear the veil from him, strip the myelin from his very nerves. He is too much for me, not the other way around, I had it wrong from the beginning. Even split apart and raw and subjugated he is powerful, devastating.

“I know, I know,” I say slipping into French, anything to break the silence. “Good, you’re doing so good,” nonsense words, true words, remembering what it had been like for me with Nikki, “So good, you’re doing so good. You’re so good for me.” It is. That good. So good, it hurts the way he squeezes down leaving no room, nothing left to come into, not the way we fit together, locked in an intricate puzzle of blood and bone and history.

He is my every filthy, hidden wish made flesh. I’m powerfully fascinated by the contrasts between us, my golden-brown body against his dynamic, incandescent one. The smallness of him arouses me deeply. I breathe him in. His hair smells of sandalwood. His skin of cedar. The precision of muscle in his back strung taut like a bow. At first, I’m careful, moving in short, languid thrusts. My body searching for the rhythm I know he likes. Raptly watching his face in profile, the shape of his lips in a half-formed kiss, eyes closed. Peaceful, save for the begging sounds issuing from his throat, more song than whimper, sharp and knife-bright.

“I need this,” I admit, tonguing the roof of my own mouth, my teeth, thinking of Louis kissing me, me kissing him. “Need this more and more every day.”

“Is that all you have?” he challenges, like he didn’t hear me, sugarcane voice full of Louisiana witchery and old mischief. “You speak of want and need but you hesitate in claiming me.” He rears back then, violently bottoming out, knocking the breath from my chest with the snap of his hips into my lap, as though he’d pushed me through a fifth story window.

“Shut up,” I say and grip him hard by the hip, snarling into his ear: “Or I’ll leave you come-soaked and sloppy and clutching around nothing,” and treat him to the brutality he craves. I press premature marks of possession into his flesh, holding him tightly enough his bones creak in my fists. Ring an arm around his chest, hand flat over his thudding heart, pinching and plucking his nipple between my knuckles.

In all fairness, a kiss isn’t so much to ask, especially after tongue-fucking an ass that has no other purpose than to provide the suddenly-no-longer-redundant-hole in which to warm my dick, or dazzle me with some complicated pole-riding technique. Louis doesn’t seem to think so though. I lean over his shoulder, rooting to capture him by the mouth. But he evades me, tucking his head.

Damned if I won’t yet get my way, I mentally kick the armchair, sending it careening out of Louis’ reach. I push Louis’ face to the rug by the slippery shoulders, posing him like a man in prayer, the sluttiest of saints with ass held high and legs wishbone wide.

With white-knuckled urgency and painfully aware and awake and sensitive I give in to riding the punishing heartbreak throb in my dick to completion. Louis’ body has me in a marital stranglehold, clinging to me like a blushing bride newly deflowered, body sucking at me, making kissing sounds of devotion. Mercilessly, I give myself up utterly: every gorgeous, fat, heady, heavy inch.

It’s not until I pull out completely that Louis makes a broken, breathless sound and falls into an appalled tangle of limbs like I’d just murdered him. I flip him, by the hip, onto his back, and take him there again, in the circle of splintered firelight, on the jewel-toned rug. His kitten-weak body accepting me easily, wantonly, now. Having given up the ghost. His stomach shivers and twitches against mine and I braid our hands together, pin them on either side of his startled face. Lead one down between our bodies, to the concavity of his belly, providing something for him to push against, to focus on.

“I’m inside you,” I say, “You’re mine. Always.” I bite into his neck, swallowing blood and swooning. Unmercifully wringing out another torturous, squirming orgasm from his body in slow, thin dribbles before allowing myself to let go. When I do, it’s with desperate, crazed movements and a woebegone wail that shakes the dust from the rafters. Not quite triumphant. “Christ. Fuck--”

Battle-sprawled, Louis kisses me. He.Kisses. Me . Licks blood from my mouth. Perhaps to shut me up but I don’t care. It’s a kiss, embracing and open-legged and un-selfconscious with afterglow.

“Thought I was too unclean for you,” I say, catching my breath out of inborn reflex, past mortal need.

“Changed my mind,” he says, cautiously smiling and apprehensive, but also strangely composed like I hadn’t just fucked him into tomorrow. “Mortal coil has no place here with you.”

I laugh, slipping out with the movement. Louis grimaces, clearly disgusted; affronted at the sopping mess I made of him.

“You’ve ruined me, you beast,” he says, affecting distress, adding, “Would it kill you to pull out once in a while?”

“Hush, you love when I wreck you-- and yes, it would kill me,” I roll off onto my back next to him. “I have a better idea. Turn around, I’ll lick you clean and kiss it better.”

With a sound of disgust, he shoots up to a sitting position. From the look of him I know I’ve gone and reached his limit of impropriety. “ What in hell, Lestat! I give you an inch--” he flounders, so done with my raunchy humor. Louis rarely curses and only when words fail him, which isn’t often.

“I know, I know,” I say, bringing my hands in front of my chest in surrender. And because I can’t help myself: “Have my fantasy baby, then.”

His eyes are huge when he looks at me, lips swollen from biting into them. A flash of heat that’s almost adolescent in its enthusiasm overcomes me and I open my arms to him like a child, reaching and rejoicing.

“The joke is tiresome,” he says, not-rolling his eyes, because he’s learnt to take me seriously even in jest. “I gave you an answer. If you put Fareed up to any funny business I will find out and cut you in your sleep.” To soften the blow, he scoots closer to lie on top of my chest, tangling our legs together, his cheek positioned over my near-bursting heart. I run my gropey hands over his narrow back, slim hips, settle them over his ass. Smack it lightly for jiggles and giggles.

“Can you stop doing that?” Louis hisses. “And _no_. It's not up for interpretation, Lestat.”

“It’s only pretend ,” I argue, pouting into the black wilderness of his hair. “Come on, Louis, pretend with me.”

“Alright,” he mumbles and my dick throbs unreasonably optimistic. I could very well jump for joy; when Louis adds slyly, with a consciously ironic tone: “I want to have your abortion.”

“That defies the purpose!” I bemoan, stung again by the offhand rejection, the careless dismissal. “You’re no fun, Pointe du Lac . . . Although, I never pegged you for a Chuck Palahniuk fan.”

“Cyril is,” he hums, breath and stray lock of hair tickling my nipple, fingers drumming just underneath. “He introduced me to Chuck’s work. I’m hooked. I can quote from the movie if you like.”

“Huh.” I don’t know how to feel about Louis reading aloud to Cyril in my absence, somewhere between jealousy and amusement maybe. But mostly because I thought of it as an ‘us’ thing. And also because so many crucial events can, and usually do, take place behind one’s back. “Okay, shoot.”

He smiles, hesitant and shy and utterly adorable, swallowing audibly as he screws his eyes shut and says to me in a sexy voice, because it's not something he can turn on and off: “I haven’t been fucked like that since grade school.

“Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah---” I completely lose it, near screaming with laughter. “I take it back. You are all-the-fun! All the time, Louis. Oh my God , how I love you. Wait till I tell Cyril what you just said! He’s going to flip . I must record you. It would make the best ringtone ever! Please, please, let me. If you do I might consider benching the male pregnancy jokes.”

"No you wouldn't"

"You're probably right but it was worth a try."

***


End file.
